Cerner, Kansas City Wizards development deal goes for final approval
A proposed development agreement calling for a new 18,000-seat soccer stadium for the Kansas City Wizards and a first-class office campus for 4,000 new Cerner Corp. employees is scheduled to be acted on by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kan., during a special meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The agreement is between the Unified Government and Kansas Unified Development LLC, a single-purpose entity created to develop the $400 million-plus project in the Village West retail district of Kansas City, Kan. Completion of the agreement comes three months after the Kansas Department of Commerce offered the developers a roughly $230 million incentive package to lure the project from the former Bannister Mall redevelopment site in south Kansas City.
The agreement calls for the new stadium to be completed by 2012 or before on an 11-acre site between Nebraska Furniture Mart and the Kansas Speedway. It will be financed with private investment and $147 million in state sales tax revenue (STAR) bonds.
The Cerner campus is to be developed on 58 acres between Great Wolf Lodge and Chateau Avalon and financed with private investment and state incentives for new office jobs. The agreement calls for the first 100,000 square feet of construction in the Cerner office campus to begin by Dec. 1, 2011, and for the campus to house 4,000 new jobs with an average annual salary of $54,000 by 2016.
If Cerner fails to meet the jobs milestone, the agreement states, the developer would be obligated to pay the Unified Government $30.4 million in 10 equal installments of $3.04 million beginning on Jan. 1, 2017. The state of Kansas is requiring the Unified Government to forward any such payments to the state.
The agreement also calls for the developer to build 18 tournament-quality youth soccer fields in Wyandotte County Park and three recreational soccer fields at locations within Wyandotte County to be determined by the Unified Government and the developer by May 1.
The developer also is required to pay $18 million to the Unified Government for the stadium and office campus sites. The Unified Government will convey the title to the campus site to Cerner, and it will convey the title to the stadium site to the developer.
Filed under: economics by John